It integrates with PTC's Creo Elements/Pro, Windchill, and Creo Elements/View. Mathcad is part of a broader product development system developed by PTC, addressing analytical steps in systems engineering. Mathcad today includes some of the capabilities of a computer algebra system, but remains oriented towards ease of use and documentation of numerical engineering applications. This approach was adopted by systems such as Mathematica, Maple, Macsyma, MATLAB, and Jupyter. Mathcad's central interface is an interactive notebook in which equations and expressions are created and manipulated in the same graphical format in which they are presented (WYSIWYG). Mathcad was named 'Best of '87' and 'Best of '88' by PC Magazine 's editors. Mathcad was acquired by Parametric Technology in April 2006. Other equation solving systems existed at the time, but did not provide a notebook interface: Software Arts' TK Solver was released in 1982, and Borland's Eureka: The Solver was released in 1987. It was also the first to check the consistency of engineering units through the full calculation. It was the first system to support WYSIWYG editing and recalculation of mathematical calculations mixed with text. Mathcad was conceived and developed by Allen Razdow and Josh Bernoff at Mathsoft founded by David Blohm and Razdow.

It was originally developed by Mathsoft, and since 2006 has been a product of Parametric Technology Corporation. Released in 1986 on DOS, it introduced live editing ( WYSIWYG) of typeset mathematical notation in an interactive notebook, combined with automatic computations.

Mathcad is computer software for the verification, validation, documentation and re-use of mathematical calculations in engineering and science, notably mechanical, chemical, electrical, and civil engineering.

Mathcad 5.0 student